Machine of Lum The Mad - In-game History

In-game History

Baron Lum the Mad, while exploring a castle his armies had conquered, came across the Machine that would bear his name, a horseshoe-shaped nightmare of black metal, festooned with levers, dials, sockets, wires, and plugs. Through trial and error, he learned to manipulate it, learning more about its functioning than even the wisest sages have since then. If he was mad before, the blasphemous technology of the device drove him over the edge, but it also brought him great power. With his disciplined troops and his new powers, he carved out a mighty fiefdom. It is said that, with the machine, he brought no fewer than 50 new species of monsters into the world.

Lum's reign approached its twilight when his formally loyal subordinate, General Leuk-O, discovered the Mighty Servant artifact in the Belching Vortex that would become known by his name. Some believe the Mighty Servant and the Infernal Machine were created by the same otherworldly artificer, and the appearance of them both so close together was no coincidence. With the power of the Mighty Servant, Leuk-O gathered a host that matched Lum's own. The two armies clashed many times before their final battle, when Lum disappeared. A mysterious mist appeared, and Lum plunged through a dimensional rift to the plane of Limbo, where he waited for centuries, his connection to the machine leaving him unable to die.

The machine itself was housed in the fortress Rifter, near Rauxes, until the latter city was destroyed in 586 CY, quite likely due to the machine's wild influence.